A wily federal judge in Boston this week quietly cleared a path toward having the question of whether the president can wrest control of mail-in voting away from states answered, which the Trump administration has insisted is too soon to decide.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, ruled that the U.S. Postal Service violated her injunction by finalizing a rule to carry out Trump's executive order restricting mail ballots in states that don't turn over their voter data. Her order had barred the Postal Service from "initiating or completing" any such rulemaking, and she said the government had "feigned complete compliance."
Rather than pursue contempt or penalties, Talwani took what former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance called an "interesting tack." In her Civil Discourse newsletter, Vance noted the judge instead pointed the plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, toward filing an amended complaint challenging the finalized rule directly.
That teed up the question of whether the order is even lawful, the exact issue the Supreme Court declined to decide a day earlier, when it handed Trump a partial win by lifting a separate injunction.
Vance argued the administration had "torpedoed its own best argument," that the case wasn't ripe, by issuing the very rule it had told the justices it hadn't yet produced.
The former prosecutor wrote that the Solicitor General's lawyers aren't expecting to seize control of voting this year.
"They're really playing for 2028," she surmised.
The administration has said it didn't violate the order because the rule won't be enforced this year unless the block is lifted. The ruling adds to a string of court findings this year that Trump's administration has skirted judicial orders on voting rights.
Editor's note: Judge Talwani lifted her remaining nationwide injunction, saying the Supreme Court's Monday ruling "compelled" her to do so. The decision clears the way for the Postal Service to carry out Trump's mail-voting rule for November, though Talwani again called the order "likely unconstitutional" and said it could unleash "chaos." Roughly two dozen Democratic-led states, plus Pennsylvania's governor, have filed a fresh lawsuit to block the rule, and the League of Women Voters plaintiffs can still amend their complaint to challenge it directly.